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This paper aims to investigate the Chinese employment relationship under the framework of psychological contracts. The authors explored the effects of firm ownership (in terms of state-owned and private enterprises) and employment type (in terms of permanent and temporary employees) on employee perceptions of psychological contract. In addition, the associations between fulfilled psychological contract and various dimensions of employee attitudes were examined.

The authors adopted a questionnaire as the primary instrument to investigate the impact of firm ownership and employment type on psychological contract perceptions and outcomes. The analysis was based on a Chinese sample of a size of 363 employees.

The results indicate that state-owned employees overall reported fewer promises (employer under-obligation promised psychological contract), while private employees tended to have more promises (mutual high obligation, employer over-obligation and quasi-spot obligation promise-based psychological contract). Permanent employees reported high fulfillment (employer over-obligation, mutual high obligation and employer under-obligation fulfilled psychological contract). In contrast, temporary employees presented many promises (mutual high obligation promised psychological contract) and low fulfillment (quasi-spot fulfilled psychological contract). In general, firm ownership had weak effects on permanent and temporary employees’ perceptions of promise-based psychological contract, but no significant influence on fulfillment-based psychological contract. Moreover, psychological contract fulfillment was positively related to employees’ fairness perception and job satisfaction, while negatively related to the intention to quit. The authors failed to find comprehensive statistical support for the moderating effects of firm ownership or employment type.

The study contributes to the literature through a number of ways. First, instead of psychological contract breach, the authors use psychological contract fulfillment as a direct measure to examine the relationship between psychological contract and employees’ attitudes. Second, they investigate the effects of firm ownership on employment relationship under the psychological contract framework, enriching the institutional lens of the issue. Third, while majority of psychological contract studies concerning employment type concentrate on either permanent or temporary employees, the authors take both types into account. Fourth, they integrate perspectives of firm ownership and employment type. Finally, the authors perform the study in the Chinese context, which offers extra evidence to the body of psychological contract literature.

The purpose of this paper is to present an empirical study of the link between psychological contract fulfilment and affective states at work. The paper argues that perceived organizational support is the key attitudinal intervening variable that arises from the cognitive assessment of the exchange relationship between employer and employee and is in turn related to the generation of affective states at work.

The paper tests this assumption using a manager sample of 249 participants and a longitudinal design.

Perceived organizational support mediates the relationship between psychological contract fulfilment and workplace affect.

Affect was not measured in real time, but through self‐reports. Future research could study how and under what conditions psychological contract fulfilment generates perceived organizational support.

One of the few studies that have sought to research the affective dimension of the psychological contract.

This study aims to examine how organizational change and attitude towards change affects the fulfillment of the psychological contract. The influence of type of change, impact of change, former change experiences and frequency of change on fulfillment of the psychological contract is assessed, as well as the influence on the employee's attitude towards change.

Regression analyses were carried out to test the effects of the change antecedents and the attitude towards change on the fulfillment of the psychological contract and to test the effects of the change determinants on the attitude towards change. The data used in this study are from 161 respondents working for different organizations who completed an online questionnaire.

The results show that type of change, impact and former experience with organizational change influence attitude towards change. With respect to the fulfillment of the psychological contract, only frequency, former experiences and the attitude towards change had an impact.

A limitation is the cross-sectional design of the study. A recommendation for future research is to further explore the results by using case studies or longitudinal research.

This study contributes to managers', HR professionals' and change professionals' understanding of the change factors that have the highest impact for employees.

This study highlights the effects of organizational changes on the psychological contract and includes the role of attitude towards change. Empirical research in this area is scarce.

This paper aims to investigate the relationships among repatriates' perceived psychological contract fulfillment, counterfactual thinking, and job attitudes.

The paper sampled 135 repatriates from 16 multinational companies (MNCs) in Taiwan through a survey questionnaire. The paper used hierarchical regression analyses to test its hypotheses.

The study results showed that repatriates' perceived fulfillment of their psychological contracts was negatively related to turnover intent and positively related to organizational commitment, after controlling for the variables of change assessments. The study also finds a positive relationship between upward counterfactual thinking and turnover intent and between downward counterfactual thinking and organizational commitment. Moreover, repatriates' perceived fulfillment of their psychological contracts was found to be related to upward counterfactual thinking but not downward counterfactual thinking.

A subjective perception of psychological contract fulfillment is a more important predictor of job attitudes than actual changes in position, pay, and skill improvement. Therefore, it is important for MNCs to maintain open communications with their repatriates to ensure clear understanding of the agreement existing between employees and the organization.

In the international human resource literature, it is unclear whether the relationship between expatriates' (or repatriates') perceived fulfillment of their psychological contract with their job attitudes are simply due to their assessments of actual changes in pay, position, and skills. In the case of repatriation, the paper clarifies the phenomenon by distinguishing both repatriates' assessments of changes before and after expatriation and their perceived fulfillment of psychological contracts (and their counterfactual thinking).

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between congruence between employee and employer psychological contract fulfillment and commitment. The authors further studied how the relationship is moderated by distributive justice.

The authors conducted polynomial regression analyses with response surface methodology on two Korean samples.

Congruence between employee and employer psychological contract fulfillment was positively related to affective commitment and occupational commitment. Distributive justice moderated these relationships.

The main limitation was common method bias as a result of the cross-sectional nature of the study designs.

Employers must be vigilant not only with regard to fulfilling employees’ psychological contracts but also to doing this fairly.

The authors studied the interaction effect of distributive justice on the relationship between psychological contract congruence and commitment in Korea.

The study examined the relationship between human resource (HR) signals and intent to stay (ITS) in an attributional framework. It also investigated the mediating role of psychological contract fulfillment in the relationship between the strength of HR signal and ITS.

The data were collected from 460 managers in the manufacturing sector from eastern India using a structured questionnaire. The study adopted a mediated structural equation model to test the model fit and hypotheses.

The study confirmed the relationship between the strength of the H R signal and the ITS, and the mediating role of psychological contract fulfillment between the strengths of HR signals and ITS. The study indicates a positive role of the psychological contract fulfillment in strengthening the effect of HR signals on ITS.

The study adds to the body of knowledge by confirming a signaling role of HR practices within the firm having the attributional ability. It also indicates the role of psychological contract fulfillment in employee retention.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the quality of change information influences employees’ attitude toward organizational change and turnover intention. Additionally, the role of engagement, psychological contract fulfillment and trust in the relationship between change information and attitude toward change is assessed.

In a technology services organization that was implementing a “new way of working,” questionnaire data of 669 employees were gathered. The organizational change in question sought to increase employees’ autonomy by increasing management support and improving IT support to facilitate working at other locations (e.g. at home) or at hours outside of regular working hours (e.g. in evening).

The results showed that change information was positively related to psychological contract fulfillment and attitude toward change. Engagement and psychological contract fulfillment were positively related to attitude toward change and negatively related to turnover intention. Contrary to what was expected, trust did not influence attitude toward change but was negatively related to turnover intention.

The study presents a model that can help management to foster positive affective, behavioral, and cognitive responses to change, as well as to reduce employee turnover. Fulfilling employees’ psychological contracts and cultivating engagement is important in this respect, as well as continuously considering whether information about the organizational change is received in good time, is useful, is adequate and satisfies employees’ questions about the change.

As one of the first studies in its field, attitude toward change was conceptualized and operationalized as a multidimensional construct, comprising an affective, a behavioral and a cognitive dimension.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how frequency of change (FC) in organizations and impact of change (IC) influence the employee behaviors, i.e. exit, voice, loyalty, and neglect (EVLN) through psychological contract fulfillment (PCF) as a mediator. The moderating role of successful past changes (SPC) is also assessed with direct and indirect relations of FC, and IC alongside employees’ behaviors.

Hypotheses were tested among a sample of 398 financial services-oriented non-managerial-level employees in Pakistan. Bootstrapped moderated mediation analyses (using PROCESS macro) were conducted to test the main and moderated mediation effects. The authors ran series of confirmatory factor analyses to validate the distinctiveness of variables and their items in this study.

The results largely supported the hypotheses. Findings showed that FC is negatively related to loyalty but positively related to exit, voice, and neglect behaviors via contract fulfillment. IC is also found to have negatively related to loyalty but positively related to exit, voice, and neglect via PCF. SPC was found to moderate the relation between FC, IC, and contract fulfillment, as well as the indirect relationship with exit, voice, and neglect through contract fulfillment and negatively between FC, IC, and loyalty through contract fulfillment. The authors found direct interaction effects of FC via SPC in relation to exit and loyalty and also found direct interaction effects of IC via SPC to exit, voice, and loyalty.

The use of cross-sectional research design does not allow conclusions with respect to causality. The most important implication of the study is that employee behaviors following organizational change can best be understood via a psychological contract framework. A future suggestion is to include more organizations based on longitudinal research design with focus on both employee and employer perspective.

This study highlights the importance of employees’ behavioral responses and their sensemaking of PCF in a post-organizational change period.

This study empirically investigated the effects of FC, and IC on fulfillment of psychological contract and behavioral responses of employees using a sample of non-managerial employees, and provides new insights into employee behaviors following organizational changes.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how temporary agency workers’ job attitudes are influenced by the fulfilment of the psychological contract; a set of employees’ expectations, formed with the temporary work agency and its client: the host organisation.

The paper estimated moderated regressions with data collected through an online survey of 352 temporary agency workers employed by a large temporary work agency in Switzerland.

Results suggest that temporary agency workers’ job satisfaction, commitment towards the host organisation, and intentions to stay with the temporary work agency relate positively to the fulfilment of the psychological contract by both organisations. Additionally, reported spill-over-effects imply that the fulfilment of the psychological contract by one organisation moderates job attitudes towards the other organisations.

Results of the explorative study reveal that future research should consider the interrelated nature of psychological contracts in working arrangements when multiple employers are involved. However, for more generalisable results, a greater international sample, including different temporary work agencies, would be favourable.

Findings will help temporary work agencies to better understand how they rely on host organisations to fulfil the temporary agency workers’ psychological contract to attract and retain temporary agency workers.

This paper contributes to the literature in the understudied field of non-traditional work arrangements as one of the few to examine these spill-over-effects both empirically and theoretically.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of individualism-collectivism (IC) in determining psychological contract fulfillment (PCF) at individual level, thus attempting to establish that cultural orientation of each individual may differentially predict the fulfillment of his/her psychological contract.

Structural equation modeling was conducted on the cross-sectional data collected from 465 IT professionals working at different multi-national software companies.

Model fit between the dimensions of IC and PCF was found to be good, indicating a significantly positive relationship between within-culture cultural orientation of an individual and his/her perception of PCF. The analyses revealed that collectivist beliefs, values and norms have a significant relationship with the perception of delivery, fairness and trust toward PCF. The relationship between collectivist values and fairness of the deal was found to be insignificant.

A major theoretical implication of the study is its contribution to evidence that people with collectivist orientation have a relatively positive perception toward the fulfillment of a psychological contract between them and the employer. It also clarifies why employees working in the same work environment tend to develop unique psychological contracts owing to their tendency to orient toward a particular cultural state of mind in the form of beliefs, values and norms guiding their day-to-day work-life.

The study is a valuable addition to the current literature in two ways. First, it contributes to the area of personality by examining the individual cultural orientation as an individual difference predictor of PCF. This helps in understanding the role of differences in emotions, cognition and behavior among individuals in predicting the fulfillment of hidden expectations of employees. In the domain of psychological contract, it contributes to evidence that explains why employees in same job conditions and employment relationships experience breach or fulfillment owing to their difference in cultural orientation.